Product customization is popular within many retail markets. Customers may add personalized features to a wide variety of products, such as greeting cards, T-shirts, hats, and golf balls. The personalization itself may take many forms, such as the product size, shape and color, and the location, size, shape and color of added text and graphics.
The personalization options presented to the customer are often quite limited. For example, a customer designing a personalized greeting card may be required to make a series of discrete text selections, each text selection coming from a limited number of prewritten choices. Or, if the customer is allowed to create his or her own text, it may be limited to a preset number of characters. Such limitations necessarily constrain the ability of customers to fully express themselves via the resulting personalized products.
Computer hardware and software developed for home use now provides a new source of text and graphics that may be incorporated into a personalized product. Customers may use applications such as Adobe Illustrator™, Paint Shop Pro™, and Corel Photo-Paint™ to create digital images for this purpose. The images created with these applications, however, often possess greater spatial resolution and include a larger number of colors than may be handled by the manufacturer of the personalized product. Furthermore, the size, shape, or format of the digital image may fail to correspond with the needs of the manufacturer. For a particular digital image, these limitations may preclude the creation of a personalized product utilizing that digital image, or at least result in a product that is unsatisfactory to the customer.
Similarly, word processors such as Microsoft Word™ and Corel WordPerfect™ provide customers with hundreds or even thousands of different typestyles for text. Many of these fonts, however, may be incompatible with the needs of the manufacturers of the personalized product.
Furthermore, customers may want to incorporate images and text into personalized products in myriad different ways. For example, some customers may want to add features to the brim of a baseball cap, rather than merely to the traditional location at front and center on the crown of the hat. Some such variations may be impossible for manufacturers of the personalized product to produce. At present, such customers may exert great time and effort up front to generate designs that are known by the manufacturers to be impractical.
Personalization systems developed for a user at a home computer requires the user to load specialized software onto his or her home computer. As such, the user must have a computer with an operating system compatible with the specialized software, and he or she must go to the trouble of acquiring the specialized software in the first place.
The present invention seeks to overcome these and other problems.